Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said that the Biden-Harris administration won’t criticize threats against American freedom of speech by the European Union over an interview with Donald Trump and Elon Musk on his social media platform.
In a letter, Chairman Jordan told Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the U.S. State Department told lawmakers that it has no plans to publicly object to Thierry Breton’s threats of censorship against an American social media company.
The letter from Jordan also said that the State Department has messages about Breton’s threats against Elon Musk’s X platform, but they have not yet given them to the Judiciary Committee.
Breton, who was the EU’s censorship czar until this week, sent Mr. Musk a public letter hours before the anticipated X Spaces interview on August 12. In it, he threatened to use all the powers at his disposal under Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which could include fines of a significant amount of money and even a ban within the bloc.
Breton claimed that the live chat with the Republican presidential candidate would not go against Brussels’ speech rules, which say that people can’t spread “content that may incite violence, hate, and racism.” The politician from France then asked Musk to take “mitigation steps” to stop the “amplification of harmful material that could “have negative effects on civil speech and public safety” in Europe.
People said that the EU was meddling in the American election process by stepping in and asking for control of a U.S. tech company and a presidential candidate. And yet, the Biden-Harris government did not say anything like that. Jordan wrote that the State Department told his committee that it “has not and does not plan to condemn Mr. Breton’s threats in public.”
“The Biden-Harris Administration’s lack of response to Mr. Breton’s threats against free speech in the US tells the world that it does not support free speech online and is not willing to defend American businesses against foreigners who want to punish them for following First Amendment rules in the US,” wrote Jordan.
